and crime rate) as it removes the influence of a third (in this case, outside temperature). A third variable that explains the relationship between two variables can be a mediating variable or a confounding variable. Those are different types of variables with different definitions, though, and are easy to confuse. In our example with correlations, a confounding variable is something like temperature that affects both our variables of interest and explains the correlation between them. A mediating variable is a variable that comes between our two variables of interest and explains the apparent
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